The Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences (DISTAL) of the University of Bologna – Alma Mater Studiorum participated in the Kick-off Meeting of the European project FIT4CEA (Futureproof Innovations and Technologies for Controlled Environment Agriculture), held in Wageningen, the Netherlands, on June 4 and 5, 2026. FIT4CEA is a project funded under the Horizon Europe program – Call HORIZON-CL6-2025-02-FARM2FORK-08, dedicated to exploring the potential of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA).
The consortium, coordinated by Wageningen University (WU, the Netherlands), brings together 22 partners, including research institutes, universities, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and trade associations, with the participation of non-EU institutions such as Seoul National University (South Korea) and Laval University (Canada). The overall objective of the project is to unlock the potential of CEA as a future-proof and climate-resilient production system for the production of healthy and nutritious foods—particularly fruits and vegetables—through innovations and technologies across all dimensions of sustainability (environmental, economic, and social).
DISTAL-UNIBO is responsible for coordinating WP4 – Diverse and Nutritious Food, with the aim of developing optimized cultivation protocols for novel and highly nutritious crops in CEA systems; integrating IoT-robotic sensing platforms for real-time monitoring of product quality (in collaboration with INESC and AUA); and developing adaptive phenotyping models based on machine learning for predicting the performance of new crops and varieties (in collaboration with WU). The trials will be conducted at the AlmaVFarm (the experimental vertical farm in the Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences at the University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy) and at Swedish corporate partner (Nära Sverige, NS).
Representative: Dr Giuseppina Pennisi (DISTAL – Università di Bologna), Prof. Francesco Orsini (DISTAL – Università di Bologna
